Why? The question of why may befuddle even the most
nobly, batty individuals, but that doesn't diminish the importance of
having something you hold near and dear to you in your soap dish. Bacon
is truth, friend. It's not only a food that knows no culinary boundaries,
it is a forceful, vengeful, little pile of fat that loves to make things
crispy and dangerous.

Bacon makes everything crazy. Tie two hot dogs together
with bacon. Strangle Bay scallops with bacon. Devil an egg and then stab
it with bacon. Stick seventy-seven strips of bacon up a Cornish hen's
ass. Rape a baked potato with bacon. Fuck with your peanut butter sandwich.
When it's expecting the grape jam, hit it with the bacon. Crush 6 pounds
of the extra crispy stuff and make your soups and salad cry. Oh, and bacon
gravy! Throw 97 biscuits into a hot tub full of bacon gravy. Clog arteries.
Grow love handles. Eat bacon. Wake up and smell the bacon, Utah.

Ding.

In the middle of this delirium, the lights came on at
the Black Table. The good ol' boot kicked the marble down the slide knocking
the bucket off its ledge and we're off. Whoo hoo. We are off. Blenders
are lighting up the room,
the crappy beer cans
spiral high to the ceiling and the evil fucking Baptists are picketing
Fred Rogers funeral.

If cleanliness is godliness, bacon is truth. And the
truth shall make you clean. Nobody wants to smell like bacon, obviously,
but in the spirit of watching The Black Table's kooky ideas gurgle, belch,
and shit all over the floor, we bring you bacon soap.

Amen.

THE RECIPE

You're gonna need some gear, like spoons and bowls
and crap, but when it comes to actual stuff in the soap? Water and bacon
are really easy. Lye's the hard one to find.

1/2 oz., or 1 Tbl., of lye

1/4 cup cold water

1/2 cup lukewarm bacon fat

Full disclosure:
We're using a bastardized version of the recipe found at the Walton
Feed website, which was adapted from Making the Best of Basics
by James Talmage Stevens, which was published by something called the
"Peton Corporation." Lots of borrowing going on right here.

And a warning:
We're neither chemists nor experienced soap makers, merely a bunch of
crazy kids with three pounds of bacon and a dream. Follow these at your
own risk. Don't blind yourself.

It's bacon, baby.

And you're gonna need a whole lot of it to make
even the teensiest amount of soap. Mostly fat, without any nutrition,
bacon has always been something of a ghetto meat, so go for the cheap-ass
supermarket bacon. In the

Dark Ages, poor people lived on this crap like
college students with ramen noodles. In the Wild West, bacon was just
a penny a pound and so common that travellers reported seeing tons in
piles along the road as people tossed it away. A tall tale, perhaps, but
over time, the poor people of the world got inventive and learned that
with the help of a deadly poisons, you can make soap out of crap like
bacon fat.

Buckle up. It's go time.

A TIP TO COOK YOUR BACON LIKE A CHAMP.

1. Put the flame on low, not high, which

will ensure your bacon sizzles and doesn't scorch right into the pan.
2. Add bacon and wait. No seriously. Just sit there. 3.
Bacon will get brown. 4. Bacon will get very brown.

FAT IS GOOD.

After a long time cooking the bacon, you will generate a lot of orangey-brown
fat, along with black bacon bits. While you may be tempted to take a sip,
resist the urge -- you're gonna need to use all this fat...

...just not like this. In the world of soap-making, the best soaps come
from the purist fats. And bacon clearly ain't the front-runner for cleanest
fat. It's the Detroit of fats, really. In order to make a soap that's
not utterly gross, you're gonna need to purify that fat by boiling it.
It's really quite easy if you follow the steps below.

CLEANING YOUR BACON FAT FOR FUN AND PROFIT.

1. Just dump the fat into a pot with an equal amount of water.
2. Boil the hell out of it for about 10 to 15 minutes, turn off
the heat and then let the pot cool a bit.

CHILL THAT SHIT OUT.

Once you've boiled the fat, you need to stick it in
the fridge to get the water and the oil to separate. Fat is heavier than
water, which is why John Goodman has such a tough time in the lap pool
these days. Mush around the stuff in your fridge, make a little room for
your pot of fat and be prepared to wait an hour or more for your clean
and creamy bacon fat to sink to the bottom. While you're waiting, might
we suggest spraying the house with some air freshener, because after cooking
two pounds of bacon and boiling

the fat, your house is going to smell like a short-order cook after a
triple shift. With the water and fat separated, carefully pour off the
water that's on top and behold the wonder that is bacon grease.

NO, SERIOUSLY. BEHOLD.

This is bacon fat. It will feel exactly how you think fat would feel
if there was no such thing as skin to keep it in. It's nasty, gloppy shit
that can turn brown paper bags into picture windows and in no way resembles
anything resembling soap. But once you add a deadly, noxious poison whose
most prized characteristic is the ability to melt hair, that fat will
toughen up a bit. Remember this picture. It will be the last time you
will behold bacon fat in this lovely, lovely state.

INTRODUCING LYE AND THE ETERNAL QUESTION, "WHY
THE FUCK DO THEY STILL SELL THIS DANGEROUS CRAP?"

Lye, is probably best known as that crap your grandmother
used to clear the drains, but in the world of chemistry, it's an alkali.
A very, very strong akali -- or basic solution -- that can cause gnarly
chemical burns. Like in that scene from Fight Club, when Brad Pitt
burns Edward Norton's hand. That's the magic of lye. Lye is also a descendant
of lime, or that crap that Robert DeNiro told Joe Pesci to throw on Michael
Imperioli's dead body in Goodfellas. This is some serious bad-ass
shit. Don't try to go all commando when using it, either. You're gonna
need rubber gloves there, tough guy.

Chemistry fans take note: lye is also called caustic
soda and sodium hydroxide, but most people just call it lye. You can find
it in the grocery store, with the other drain cleaners, but most people
only buy it to make soap now, really.

As far as Supplies go, you're
gonna need a wooden spoon and a plastic bowl. Unless you have a stainless
steel bowl lying around, don't use anything metal, because it will react
with the lye and the fat and it will fuck you up for life. Okay, we don't
know that for sure. But we *do* know that you must use either glass or plastic,
or else really bad things happen.

Another important ingedient: COLD water. You mix powdered lye with hot
water and that stuff could fizz up like Pop Rocks and blind you for life.
And while making soap from bacon is a noble pursuit, it's really not anything
you want to get blinded doing. So wear those rubber gloves, use cold water
and eat your vegetables because there are starving people in Guam. Oh,
and as a number of readers have pointed out -- use eye protection, too.
A drop of lye gets in your eye and you'll lose your depth perception or
go blind. That's not cool.

IT'S MAGIC TIME.

1. This is fat. Say goodbye, fat! 2. Put it in a bowl.
3. Add the lye to a small amount of cold water and stir it gently,
making a solution that you will 4. add to the fat. 5. Stir
the fat, which 6. should loosen up a little bit at first, but then
as you keep stirring, 7. it will thicken again and that fat will
begin to change. 8. Keep on stirring fast and 9. you'll
get white, fluffy wannabe soap goo that's perfect for the next step.

1. Once you've got yourself some soapy glop, pour it into an ice
cube tray. 2. Wrap this tray with some Cling Wrap and let sit for
24 hours. 3. You now have some rudimentary and crude bacon soaps.

SO CLOSE, YET SO FAR AWAY.

Sadly, you're not ready to start washing with bacon soap. The soap needs
to cure, which will cause it to harden and become more brittle. The time
on this varies a great deal, but you should probably allot a good two
or three weeks to let your soap firm up and get more soap-esque.

Go ahead and smell your new bacon soaps. Doesn't smell
like bacon, huh? It just goes to show you: When you add burning horrible
chemicals to fat from the worst possible cut of pork, you'll get cute
little fucking bubbles. The world rules.

"I woke up breakfast and then all of a sudden, someone threw poison
all over me, beat me with a wooden spoon and left me out to dry for three
weeks. What the fuck!"